University of Chicago, PhD '08

BIOGRAPHY

I am a historian of the economy, the United States, and capitalism. In addition to being a member of the Department of History and the John U. Nef Committee on Social Thought I am the current Faculty Director of the Law, Letters, and Society program.

My most recent book is Ages of American Capitalism: A History of the United States (Random House, 2021), which is a history of American economic life from British colonial settlement through the Great Recession. The book is also a single-volume history of the United States.

My next book, The Real Economy: History and Theory (Princeton University Press, forthcoming 2025) argues for a novel theory of the economy, its history, and its politics. It draws inspiration from the economics of Thorstein Veblen and John Maynard Keynes, and seeks to offer a theory of the economy that is open to rich empirical and theoretical study from across the social sciences and humanities.

My future research projects include The Midas Touch, a global history of the demand for money from ancient times through the present, as well a planetary history of the city of Houston. I wrote a series of essays on Houston for the Visualizing Climate and Loss Project at Harvard’s Center for History and Economics.

My book, Freaks of Fortune: The Emerging World of Capitalism and Risk in America (Harvard, 2012), won the Organization of American Historians' Frederick Jackson Turner Award, Ellis W. Hawley Prize, and Avery O. Craven Award and the American Society for Legal History's William Nelson Cromwell Book Prize.

Recent Courses Offered

Undergraduate

• Property and the Public Interest
• The United States, 2000-2008
• History of Populism in the United States

Graduate

• The Global History of Money
• Topics in US History: The New Deal
• Emergence of Capitalism

Princeton University, PhD '95

BIOGRAPHY

I am a professor in History, the College, and the Law School. My most recent book, White Fright: The Sexual Panic at the Heart of America's Racist History (Basic Book, 2020), concerns race, sex, and the civil rights movement from emancipation to the present. My next most recent book is Building the American Republic, Volume 2: A Narrative History From 1877 (Chicago, 2018). Both volumes are free in e-book form.

My work has revolved around the relationship between race, sex, and politics in the post-Emancipation South. My first book, Before Jim Crow: The Politics of Race in Postemancipation Virginia (North Carolina, 2000), analyzed the conditions that facilitated and, ultimately, undid interracial democracy in the post–Civil War South. An edited collection with Glenda E. Gilmore and Bryant Simon, Jumpin' Jim Crow: Southern Politics from Civil War to Civil Rights (Princeton, 2000), continued the theme of African American resistance to white domination from Reconstruction through the 1950s. A third book, The Age of Jim Crow: A Norton Documentary History (Norton, 2008), examines the creation and dissolution of legal segregation in America through primary sources.

My awards include fellowships from the American Council of Learned Societies, the American Academy in Berlin, the Alphonse Fletcher Foundation, and the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation.

Yale University, PhD '90

BIOGRAPHY

Amy Dru Stanley is a historian of the United States, with particular interest in law, capitalism, freedom and unfreedom, human rights, the relationship between the household and economic life, and the historical experience of moral problems. Her work has appeared in scholarly books and journals, as well as in the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Nation, Dissent, Slate, and Jacobin. She has received the Quantrell Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching and the Faculty Award for Excellence in Graduate Teaching and Mentoring. In 2018, she was the jury chair for the Pulitzer Prize in history.

Harvard University, PhD '05

BIOGRAPHY

A deep and abiding interest in the interactions between Asian Americans and African Americans drives my first book manuscript. Focusing primarily on the home front culture of World War II, but utilizing the necessary bookends of the Popular Front of the 1930s and the Cold War of the 1950s, my monograph interrogates the ways in which different racialized and ethnic groups interacted during a heightened sense of possibility for an American multiracial democracy. Unpublished diaries of incarcerated Japanese American, Charles Kikuchi, serve as a narrative through-line for the manuscript—he wrote every day of his life, from the bombing of Pearl Harbor until his death in 1988. While Kikuchi can be considered one of a handful of radical Nisei (second-generation) intellectuals consumed by the constitutional violation of Japanese Americans, he was most deeply concerned with the welfare of African Americans and other oppressed minorities. Recognition of their equality by the rest of the nation would prove key to the fulfillment of democracy at home and abroad. My book therefore considers prototypes for Kikuchi, like Karl Yoneda, a highly visible Communist Party member during the Popular Front, intellectual mentors during the war, such as immigrant activist Louis Adamic, W.I. Thomas, and Dorothy Thomas, social scientists associated with, respectively, the Chicago school of sociology and Japanese evacuation and resettlement study, and “everyday people,” from African Americans on the South Side of Chicago to Filipino migratory farm laborers in central California. The Cold War closes off some of the interracial and democratic possibilities of this fertile intellectual era, but not before a constellation of radical counterpublics appear on the national and international maps. A cartography of this period, therefore, demonstrates not only the importance of reexamination of the Kikuchi diaries, but also the efforts and limits of these particular publics to repossess, reclaim, and redefine American democracy.  

I have been honored to be a dissertation fellow at the Charles Warren Center for Studies in American History, and an Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Postdoctoral Fellow. Prior to Chicago, I taught at Harvard, Princeton, Columbia, and most recently, the University of Michigan.

New York University, PhD '10

BIOGRAPHY

Rashauna Johnson is a historian of the 19th-century African diaspora, with an emphasis on slavery and emancipation in the US South and Atlantic World. She is especially interested in the limits and possibilities of archival histories of enslaved and freed people and the worlds in which they labored and lived. Johnson teaches courses on race, slavery, and nation; methodologies of slavery studies; and the 19th-century US.

Johnson is the author of Slavery’s Metropolis: Unfree Labor in New Orleans during the Age of Revolutions (Cambridge UP, 2016; paperback 2018), which was awarded the 2016 Williams Prize for the best book in Louisiana history and the 2018 H. L. Mitchell Award by the Southern Historical Association for the best book on the southern working class. Slavery's Metropolis was also named a finalist for the 2016 Berkshire Conference of Women's Historians Book Prize, honorable mention for the Urban History Association's Kenneth Jackson Award, and a finalist for the 2017 Frederick Douglass Book Prize. She is currently at work on her second book project, a study of race and region, slavery and emancipation in rural Louisiana. That project has been supported by the Hutchins Center for African & African American Research at Harvard University, the Mellon Scholars Post-Doctoral Fellowship in African American History at the Library Company of Philadelphia, and The Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History. In addition, she is a coeditor of The Cambridge History of the African Diaspora.

Johnson serves extensively within and beyond the profession. She has been a member of several book prize committees, including Wesley-Logan (AHA), David Montgomery (OAH), and Harriet Tubman (Schomburg), as well as program and fellowship committees. She is currently Vice President of the Association for the Study of the Worldwide African Diaspora (ASWAD), an OAH Distinguished Lecturer, and member of the Omohundro Institute Council. Consistent with her commitment to engaged scholarship beyond the profession, Johnson regularly delivers lectures to public and private high schoolers, and she has taught GED and literature courses in correctional facilities.

Johnson grew up in New Orleans, Louisiana. She earned a BA in Afro-American Studies and political science from Howard University, where she graduated summa cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa. She earned a PhD in history from New York University. Her graduate studies were supported in part by the Andrew Mellon Predoctoral Fellowship in the Humanistic Studies, and her dissertation received NYU’s 2011 Dean's Outstanding Dissertation Award in the Humanities. She is also the recipient of the Drusilla Dunjee Houston Award given by the Association of Black Woman Historians. She taught in the history department at Dartmouth College for nine years, where she directed the foreign study program in London (2017) and the honors program (2019-20). She was also affiliated with the Program in African and African American Studies (AAAS), and served on the advisory board for the Mellon Mays Undergraduate Fellowship (MMUF) Program.

Harvard University, PhD '99

BIOGRAPHY

I am a historian of inequality and its persistence. I specialize in the study of Brazil and Latin America, and focus particularly on informality, cities, citizenship, law, migration, race, slavery and its afterlives.

My first book, A Poverty of Rights (Stanford, 2008), examines how weak citizenship rights and residential informality came to define urban poverty, popular social struggles, and the political dynamics of inequality in modern Brazil. It received book awards from the Social Science History Association, the Urban History Association, the Conference on Latin American History, and the Brazilian Studies Association.

A volume I coedited with Bryan McCann and Javier Auyero, Cities from Scratch (Duke, 2014), explores the many ways in which poverty and informality have shaped the Latin American urban experience. My essay, "A Century in the Present Tense," explores the intellectual history of the informal city, arguing that slums and shantytowns are dynamic historical phenomena in their own right rather than perpetual symptoms of current crises. In various other essays and ongoing research, I have focused on informality's relationship to developmentalism and political liberalism, slavery, racial inequality in law and urban space, criminal law, internal migrations, and the relationship between the urban poor and Brazil’s political left.

Along with Brazilian historian Keila Grinberg, I have edited a volume entitled The Boundaries of Freedom, which brings together essays by leading Brazilian and Brazilianist scholars of slavery and its afterlives. My own essay, “Slavery, Freedom and the Relational City,” focuses on how unfreedoms born of slavery continued to bind urban free and freedpeople during Brazil’s age of abolition.

My current book, Intimate Inequalities: Urbanism, Slavery, and Bounded Freedom in a Brazilian City, explores the historical co-evolution of urbanism and informality. The book is based in Recife, Brazil, a northeastern city that came to be seen as both the capital of Brazilian underdevelopment and the incubator of some of the country's most innovative social and cultural movements. Recife originated as a slave city, and the social and power relations that had sustained slavery continued to structure it long after abolition in 1888. Like many other cities across the globe, Recife evolved as a place where modern technologies, economies, and liberal institutions coexisted with and depended upon urban informality. Formal institutions and economies were embedded in an essentially relational city, in which personal connections mediated economic and political life and deep inequality structured vital (and often violent) intimate interdependencies. In the twentieth century, relational power proved remarkably adaptable, inhabiting liberal institutions and radical social movements, structuring "political society," and doing much to explain both social mobility and inequality's resilience. In exposing the microhistory of this phenomenon in Recife, I explore the emergence of urban informality as part and parcel of modern governance and bring into a focus a paradigm of urban modernity that shapes city life across the globe.

Other ongoing projects focus on the "Rights to the City" movement in law, political philosophy, and practice; and the global history of urban informality through a collaborative project entitled "La Ville informelle au XXe siècle: politiques urbaines et administration des populations."

At Chicago, I am part of the Faculty Advisory Committees for the Mansueto Institute for Urban Innovation, the Art and Architecture Committee and the Latin America Faculty Working Group; and I am a Faculty Affiliate at the Center for Latin American Studies and the Center for the Study of Race, Politics, and Culture. Outside of the University, I serve on the editorial boards of Past & Present and the Journal of Latin American Studies, as well as the international Advisory Committee for the Centro de Estudos da Metrópole in São Paulo and the board of the Urban History Association. My teaching focuses both on my core research interests and on the larger histories of Brazil, Latin America, cities, and social inequality. Before coming to Chicago, I taught at Amherst College and Northwestern University.

Stanford University, PhD '86

BIOGRAPHY

Dain Borges works on nineteenth- and twentieth-century Latin American culture and ideas. His current research project, "Races, Crowds, and Souls in Brazilian Social Thought, 1880–1920," centers on the ways in which Brazilian intellectuals used race sociology and social psychology to understand popular religion and politics. He teaches seminars and courses on Latin American history, comparative nineteenth-century transformations, ideologies of national identity, and culture in the African diaspora.

Brown University, PhD '88

BIOGRAPHY

The primary national focus of my research is modern France, but I have found myself intrigued by research problems best treated transnationally. My most recent book, Cultural Revolutions, moves across the Atlantic world from Britain, to colonial and early national America, and finally eastwards again to France. My ongoing pair of projects, Strangers at Home and Conundrums of Commemoration, stay on the European continent but involve a comparative analysis of Paris and Berlin in the twentieth century. Finally, although I have not yet published extensively in this area, I maintain an active interest in and regularly teach the history of European colonialism and the postcolonial world it left behind.

Conceptually, my work focuses on the intersection of material culture, everyday life, and politics. I seek to explain how and why everyday things have become catalysts for conflict, means of expressing identities and constructing selves, vehicles for dissenting opinions, and sites of unexpected state intervention. My research agenda is based on the hypothesis, informed by phenomenology and feminist theory, that key to answering these questions is the close and careful study of material culture, but a close and careful study that always links the concreteness of everyday goods to the abstractions of polity, society, and economy.

Although the courses I offer are necessarily broader and more general than this research agenda, they have been systematically informed by it. I use material and well as visual and textual sources in virtually all my classes, and nearly all are transnational in reach.

TEACHING

Undergraduate courses (selected)

• Problems in Gender Studies

• Europe 1930 to the present

• Colonizations Civ III

• Jewish Civ III

• Modern Jewish History

• Cultural Revolutions

Graduate courses (selected)

• Seminar: Religion, Politics and Society in Modern Europe (with John Boyer)

• Everyday Life in Modern Europe (with Sheila Fitzpatrick)

• Seminar: The Politics of Memory in France and Germany (with Michael Geyer)

• Gender in Europe (with Susan Gal)

• Seminar: Race, Racism and and Anti-Racist Movements in Modern Europe

Recent fields for general examinations

• Modern European History

• Modern French History

• Gender History and Theory

• Culture and Politics in Modern Europe

• European Social History

Titles of some recent (or current) AB and AM theses and PhD dissertations

• Islam and the Republic: A Study of the Effects of the Algerian Civil War on French Understandings of Islam

• Female Action and the Closing of the Women’s Clubs during the Reign of Terror

• War Relic: Revisiting the Leaning Virgin of Albert

• Working Class Milieus under Attack: Struggles between the Left and Right in Leipzig and Lyon, 1929–1936 (co-chair with Michael Geyer)

• The Evolution of French Abolitionism and the Memories of the French and Haitian Revolutions, 1815–1848

• The Ground Beneath their Feet: Agricultural Industrialisation and the Remapping of Rural France, 1954–1976

• Making Islam French Unsettling French Algeria: Settlement, Terror, and Violence in the French-Algerian War, 1954–1962.

• The Permanent Souvenir: Tattoos and Travel from Banks to Barnum Cultivating the Nation, Refining Empire: Wine, Sugar, and Nation-building in Guadeloupe and the Aude, 1880–1910

• The Imperialism of Un-Free Trade: Nineteenth Century British Wine-Trading Enclaves in Oporto, Madeira, and Andalusia

• Writing Black, Talking Back: Consuming, Performing, and Selling Race in Postwar France, 1945–1968

• From Children to Citizens: Republican and Catholic Primary Education in France, 1880–1914

• Fashioning the Folk: The Production and Reproduction of Alsatian Traditional Dress, 1871–1939

• The Rebirth of the Mediterranean: Migrants, Race, Nation, and Labor in the Western Mediterranean, 1914–1940

• Pale Fire: Jews in Revolutionary White Russia, 1917–1929 (cochair with Sheila Fitzpatrick)

• Selling Paris: The Real Estate Market and Commercial Culture in the Nineteenth-Century Capital

Yale University, PhD '20

BIOGRAPHY

Thuto Thipe is a Postdoctoral Scholar in the Department of History. Her research focuses on social and legal history of 19th and 20th century South Africa. Her manuscript in progress, Black Freehold: Landownership in Alexandra Township, tells the story of the history of land ownership in Alexandra Township, near Johannesburg, from its founding in 1912 to 1979 when the state had stripped black land owners of their freehold land ownership and forced removals had largely displaced Alexandra residents. It moves from the examination of individual buildings and yards to a structural analysis of the Township and its development to show how different elements of land ownership rights combined to produce a dynamic, black-controlled Township that was at odds with colonists’ view of black people’s social and political place in South African society. The disruption that black people’s freehold land ownership in Alexandra caused to white supremacist order drove the South African state to invest enormous financial resources and political capital in dismantling black freehold rights, physically demolishing large parts of the Township, and forcibly moving tens of thousands of people from Alexandra in efforts to destroy the social realities that residents produced under freehold. 

She holds a PhD in History and African American Studies from Yale University, Masters in Gender Studies from the University of Cape Town, where she also held positions as a lecturer and researcher, and BA from Macalester College.

University of Virginia, PhD '15

BIOGRAPHY

Mary Hicks is a historian of the Black Atlantic, with a focus on transnational histories of race, slavery, capitalism, migration and the making of the early modern world. Her first book, Captive Cosmopolitans: Black Mariners and the World of South Atlantic Slavery, 1721-1835, reimagines the history of Portuguese exploration, colonization and oceanic commerce from the perspective of enslaved and freed black seamen laboring in the transatlantic slave trade. As the Atlantic world’s first subaltern cosmopolitans, black mariners, she argues, were integral in forging a unique commercial culture that linked the politics, economies and people of Salvador da Bahia with those of the Bight of Benin.

More broadly, she seeks to interrogate the multiplicity of connections between West Africa and Brazil through the lens of mutual cultural, technological, commercial, intellectual and environmental influences and redefine how historians understand experiences of enslavement and the middle passage. In addition to investigating the lives of African sailors, she also explores the cultural and religious sensibilities of enslaved and freed African women in living in 19th century Salvador da Bahia. Along these lines, her second book will detail the emergence and elaboration of new gendered and racialized subjectivities in the wake of Portugal’s initiation of trade with West Africa in the fifteenth century.

Prof. Hicks received her B.A. from the University of Iowa and her Ph.D. from the University of Virginia, where she was a recipient of the Jefferson Fellowship. She has also received the Ford Foundation Dissertation Fellowship and the Mamolen Fellowship at the Hutchins Center at Harvard University. She is the winner of the Southern Historical Association’s Latin American & Caribbean Section Dissertation Prize and been a finalist for the CGS/Proquest Distinguished Dissertation Award for the Humanities and Fine Arts.